I wonder how much this UI mistake is costing Spotify?

April 28, 2010

So here I am listening to some music on Spotify. This is a great album. Maybe I’ll buy it – I wonder how much it costs?

I’ll hit “buy album” to find out…

“Sign in to purchase music”. Well that sounds ominous – I don’t know what’s going to happen if I enter my password. I still don’t know how much the album will cost, and since I’ve entered my credit card details before, they probably have them on file. Will my card get instantly billed an undisclosed amount?

You can bet that the vast majority of users are going to err on the side of caution and click “cancel” at this point. I’d love to find out what kind of revenue uplift they’ll get when they fix this issue. It could be Spotify’s very own equivalent of the $300 million button.

6 comments

Totally agree, though I have no idea why anyone would buy something when they can listen to it on Spotify. That EP is ace BTW, looking forward to her new release, which sounds like it’s going to be equally ace.

You can bet that if their current existence depended on making these sales, they would be optimizing the hell out of this user journey. As it stands, they are probably quite happy ploughing through their substantial funding. Business as usual.

This is a really interesting case that is probably overlooked daily. I’ve been using Spotify for quite a long while now and I must say, it’s interesting that I had never even thought about this case. Granted, I generally don’t purchase music through Spotify, but it’s the principle of the matter. It should be interesting to see if they end up making any changes within the next quarter to facilitate or at least temporarily come up with a work-a-round for the issue.